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Saturday July 12, 2014 5:47 AM

By the time my follicles were 4,380 days old, I realized how curiously different my hair was
from other girls’.

Enviously, I noticed that the hair of others was glossy and nicely flowing, with model-perfect
texture — and that, even after being subjected to rain, dunked in a pool or exposed to the hovering
humidity of midsummer in Ohio, it dried into pleasingly tousled tresses.

Mine dried unattractively dull, frizzy and unwieldy.

Five decades later, I still fixate on my hair’s inability to be accommodating: It never does
what I want.

What is genetically evident is that my reddish-brown follicles weren’t meant for me. They were
mistakenly assigned to me; I know it.

I was justifiably offended, but facts are facts: One strand of my hair is 100 times thicker than
a normal strand of hair and, under a microscope, suggests a woolly worm.

My hair is incredibly porous, capable of sucking up even the teensiest amount of humidity —
which then makes it explode into a poufy ball that looks like pinkish cotton candy.

Once dutifully loyal to stylists, I returned month after month expecting that, this time, my
carpet hair could be curtailed.

I have paid pricey salons piles of money and vainly endured straightening and cuticle-smoothing
processes in seeking, unsuccessfully, a fix to relax my rough and rowdy hair.

Each morning, I corral my stash of ceramic-plated appliances and vitamin-infused gels, balms,
sprays, mousses, waxes and “nix-the-frizz” blow-drying serum to tame my untamable hair into a style
I can somewhat accept — only to have it betray me by absorbing the tiniest droplet of dew and
transforming my do into the ever-recurring scouring pad.

Today, my carpet hair and I are leafing through a spiffy new hairstyle magazine to find
suggestions for carpet hair — which, unsurprisingly, are not there.

Nonetheless, I continue leafing, futilely, in search of a workable style — one that won’t evoke
the question “Is that hair on her head or a raccoon?”